My husband and I moved to Haiti in October 2008 and stayed for one year. We were the first long-term missionaries sent by Movin’ With the Spirit, a small Catholic nonprofit based out of Connecticut. The first phase of our work was to build an orphanage in Duverger, a village about 70 miles from Port-au-Prince.

Haiti is a tough country — tough before the earthquake and even tougher now. We bathed, washed our laundry and watered the animals in the same river. For a few months we hiked about seven miles a day just from our home to work and back. Most people walk at least that far — often farther to school and to work — each day. But out in our villages all of this was just part of our paradise; it was Port-au-Prince that was truly tough.

We spent many weeks gathering supplies in Port-au-Prince where we stayed in a crude cement house in a steep hillside neighborhood. Port-au-Prince was crowded, smelly and chaotic. Yet young people often left their peaceful homes in their villages hoping to find work there. After being educated, kids often felt that they had too much education to be farmers like their parents and wanted jobs where they could have the dignity of wearing a suit. With a 70 percent unemployment rate, Port-au-Prince was full of poverty and disappointment. The streets and rivers were lined with trash, and people carried water for miles, as the places to get clean water were limited. Extended families crammed into tiny homes to ban together and survive.

We built our orphanage as a refuge for the orphaned and abandoned children of Port-au-Prince to offer them a new life in a clean, peaceful place. We planned to teach the children trades and the dignity of farming to try to keep them from heading to the city when they grew up like other young people. But now there is no longer a city for them to flock to.

The earthquake that hit Haiti two weeks ago was a disaster that may be the worst in our hemisphere’s history. The depth, the magnitude and the placement of it were the worst possible scenarios. But I thank God for two things: first, that it was not the type of earthquake to cause a tsunami, and second, that the earthquake happened when it did. Had it been earlier in the day, businesses and schools would have been full. Any later and everyone would have been in their beds asleep.  

We have seen a global response that Haiti has been waiting on for decades. It hurts me to think that this is what it took to get all eyes on Haiti, but it also shows me how God can make good of all situations. Worldwide people are pouring out their hearts to this country, flooding it with prayers and aid. International aid groups like Doctors Without Borders, who has had a presence in Haiti for a long time, to ones like Catholic World Mission — even though it has no one of its own on the ground — have teamed up with our mission so that they can directly support Haiti. Emergency agencies from more than 30 nations have sent teams to dig through rubble, set up hospitals and give out food and water.

It will take all of these groups to help this country recover as we each have our own place and our own mission, serving many different needs. I pray that Americans don’t forget Haiti and that everyone answers their unique calling to the mission of bringing faith, hope and love to Haiti.

Kristin Todzia is the Development Coordinator for Movin’ With The Spirit. E-mail her at kristin@mwts.org.